Page 33 of My Neighbor Literally Bites

Theo lets out a short laugh. Hannah goes to her and rights the paper, and there it is—under the three scored lines she'd read as a single mark, a fourth, fainter, set off on its own. A door no one was ever told to look for.

"She's right," Hannah says.

"Obviously," says Lily.

"From here you stay. That one isn't up for debate." I request.

She gives me a look with more of her great-grandmother in it than she knows. "No need for the voice. I already wasn't coming."

We move fast, and it's the first time the speed feels shared—Hannah inking the four entrances onto the clean map, me hauling gear to the truck, Theo penciling the false wall's angle onto the page so we can throw the line by daylight. She hands me the map before I ask for it. I fold the survey into the tin and the tin into my coat. Partners.

At the end of the drive I stop the truck. The bloodroot at the survey road has been cut. Fresh—the stems still weep where the blade went through. Somebody cleared the path in the dark. And nailed to the post where the road bends up toward the Glen, pale on the weathered wood, is a new mark: three scored lines, and a fourth set apart.

"They've already gone down," Hannah says.

I put the truck in gear. "Then so do we."

25

HANNAH

The truck stops where the road runs out of gravel and the mountain starts in earnest. I'm down on the verge before Alaric has the engine off, crouched over the bloodroot that grows thick along the ditch.

Someone's been at it. The stems are sheared clean, the cuts still weeping rust-red, and the boot prints pressed into the wet ground beside them are new — four sets, maybe five, all angled downhill toward the black mouth of the main adit.

"They've already gone in," Alaric says.

"How far ahead?"

"Not far. The sap hasn't even browned." He touches a cut stem and his fingertip comes away red and sizzling. "Within the hour."

Headlights wash through the trees behind us. A county cruiser climbs the last of the road and stops, and Sheriff Holloway, Ben, gets out slow, one hand resting near his belt.

"Hannah." He names me like he's making sure. "You want to explain the three trucks with downstate plates parked off the fire road? And the men in my woods carrying rifles they're calling survey gear?"

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

"Try me with the part I will." He thumbs his flashlight on and runs it across the cut bloodroot, the churned ground, Alaric standing quiet. His attention holds there for too long. "Elspeth send you up here before she passed?"

"In a manner of speaking."

That's enough for him. Whatever he makes of Alaric, whatever he doesn't understand yet, the name does the work. He knew her. Half the county did.

"They told the clerk they're a historical society," he says. "Historians don't cut a padlock."

"No. They don't."

He crouches across from me and spreads a map over his knee — old paper, the county seal faded to a ghost. "My granddad's. He surveyed these workings before they sealed them. Pulled it when the new trucks showed." He taps a second map, a glossy county print, laid beside it.

I look between them. It takes a moment, and then it's plain. The old map has a road the new one doesn't — a thin spur breaking off below the main adit, curving east along the slope before the paper crease swallows it.

"That road's gone," Ben says. "Not collapsed. Gone. Somebody scrubbed it off when they redrew the county. You don't lose a road by accident."

"No," I say. "You lose it on purpose."

And then I see the mark. It's small, inked in the margin beside that vanished spur — three short strokes and a fourth off on its own, scored a shade deeper. My pulse goes loud. I've seen it on the door of the old church annex, under the eave of a barn, carved into a post we found before. Elspeth's hand. Her counting.

"Sheriff. Who marked your grandfather's map?"